


I Shall Not Care

by Hattingmad



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Genre: F/M, scruffibeth, scruffington
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-20 15:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hattingmad/pseuds/Hattingmad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aboard the Pearl, James wants to drink and forget. Elizabeth, lonely and indecisive, wonders if she's been missing out on something right under her nose. Includes insightful!Ragetti, pouty!Elizabeth and cynical!James.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Shall Not Care

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from a Sara Teasdale poem of the same name. Look it up, it's beautiful and sad.

James Norrington is drunk again. This should come as no surprise to anyone, him especially, considering that since the ill-fated day he washed up in Tortuga he has constantly been in some stage of inebriation. It helps him drown out the howling in his head that says he should end it all, give up, let the sea embrace him with open arms like it should have that day he lost his crew and his ship. That is a coward’s way out, and James Norrington is no coward, even if he is reduced to being a slovenly swab under Jack Sparrow’s control.

The alcohol numbs and dulls the edges of his vision and his pain and makes it bearable to be wallowing in filth with pirates, if only just. If he is always drunk, sometimes he even forgets that Elizabeth is also on the ship, taunting the man he used to be with her nearness and her soft curves and sweet smiles that are never for him. When he throws himself into scrubbing the deck with all his might, he can look the other way and ignore the flirtation going on between her and their captain.

If Will is being cuckolded, so much the better for James. That will make two men Elizabeth Swann has ruined, three if he is lucky and she abandons Sparrow as well.

 

James is surprised to discover that he likes Pintel and Ragetti, the latter especially. Their idiocy is comforting, reminding him of another pair of seafaring nincompoops he once knew. Ragetti seems the duller of the two, but Norrington suspects it is only for show. The quiet, self-effacing man shows remarkable insight on occasion. He has a talent for looking into the human spirit and seeing exactly whatever one has been trying to hide; he diagnoses the problems of the crew with efficiency and wit, then looks guilty, as though being intelligent is above his station.

“I didn’t mean nuthin’ by it,” Ragetti frequently says, blushing a little when James remarks how canny an observer he is. “I just think that however much the Cap’n fears death, he fears Miss Swann more. An’ Miss Swann herself is very conflicted at present.”

“How so,” James asks, intrigued but not sure he really wants to hear more about her precious pirate Will.

“Well, it seems to me that she don’t know what she wants. She made her decision to go pirate all spontaneous-like, and now she’s regrettin’ what she may or may not have missed out on, should she have chosen differently.” He gives James a significant look with his good eye.His wooden eye, as always, is looking in a different direction, but James gets the message all the same.

“Plus, I reckon Jack’ll be tryin’ to use her an’ her love for Will to ‘is own ends, same as always, and Jack’s very determined when it comes to savin’ his own skin. So she’s got all these threads o’ destiny, like, hangin’ in the air and she ain’t sure which to tug on and which to cut, if you see what I mean.”

Not for the first time, James finds himself thinking Ragetti is a remarkable man— for a pirate.

 

* * *

 

  
Elizabeth Swann is tipsy. Well, alright, have it your way: drunk. Drunk and lonely and dying for anything resembling a wedding night. She isn’t complaining about the lack of Will for a groom; Elizabeth can’t afford to be picky. She’ll take the first available man that comes to hand, really.

Currently, that man is Jack, and they are dancing around each other in wobbly circles in a traditional piratical dance. At least, she assumes that’s what it is. There is a lot of spitting and kicking each other’s shins involved, and some very bawdy drinking songs. Pintel is playing a harmonica astonishingly well. Jack is leering at her in the firelight, which, she reflects, he does quite often.

James is not joining in the festivities, still too good to be associating with pirates, she supposes. Instead he is drinking quietly by himself in a corner with a vengeance. She wonders if the rum has done something to offend him personally. If it has, it was probably Jack’s fault.

Come to think of it, all of this is Jack’s fault. If it weren’t for Jack, she and Will would be happily married by now. Actually- she frowns with the effort of coherent thought- that isn’t true. Will would still be making swords somewhere and she and _James_ would be married by now. Whether or not it would have been a happy marriage was anyone’s guess.

Oh. _Oh_. No wonder he hated Jack so much. This thought is very sobering, and she feels a cloud of rum lift from her brain and go wander off somewhere else. Elizabeth is struck by a sudden curiosity as to what James would be like in his private life. She’d never expected him to be capable of the depths to which he’d sunk, or the venom and bitterness he’d demonstrated back in Tortuga. Obviously she doesn’t know him that well at all. She wonders if he makes love with the same passion he exhibited when cursing Jack Sparrow. A dangerous train of thought to be sure, but most interesting, too. She wonders if she should go say hello.

Yes, she decides, he looks as though he could use the company.

 

* * *

 

  
“Hello, James.”

“What do you want,” he says, surly.

“Drown my sorrows. Commissar… Commishill… Commodish… drink together.” Okay, so maybe she isn’t _entirely_ sober yet.

“What have you got to be sorrowful about?” He asks, ever the skeptic.

“Plenty!” She says indignantly, then has to think about it for a minute. Oh, yes. Aha. “Still a virgin, for one thing,” she says triumphantly, holding a finger under his nose.

“That’s easy enough to correct,” he says snidely, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Or is that too indelicate a suggestion for your ears?” Not that he gives a damn. He is only teasing her in that awful way of his, that way that makes her feel like he doesn’t care whether anyone — including himself— lives or dies.

“I’m stuck on this bloody ship with a bunch of smelly pirates, for another thing— not at all romantic, piracy.” James bites back an _I told you so._ “I know, I know, you were right. It’s awful when you’re wet and dirty all the time. There’s plenty to be said for warm baths.” James murmurs an assent, sighing with longing at the memory of baths.

“And,” she continues, leaning into his shoulder in solidarity, “Jack is confusing and tricky and lying to me, but I don’t know what about.”

“You expected anything else from a pirate?”

 “Well, no, but…”

“Is there a point to this discussion, or did you merely want to unburden your sorrows on my supposedly sympathetic ears?” She does a sort of agitated hopping dance, then blurts out:

“I don’t know how you taste!”

“ _What_?” James blinks furiously at her, completely unsure she’s just said what his ears have heard. She hiccups once, and then repeats herself, frowning.

“I don’t know how you taste. I should know that by now. We were childhood friends, James, and you never tried to kiss me once!” She pokes him in the chest and quickly draws back her finger, muttering an oath. His chest is far harder than she’d expected. It is also rough and dirty and smattered with dark hair.

 _Will's chest doesn't have dark hair. Perhaps that's because Will is a boy and James is a man_ , she thinks uncharitably. James raises his eyebrows and stares at her.

“This bothers you?”

“Of course it bothers me! _Everyone_ tries to kiss me!” James snorts at her arrogance, gazing up at the stars to appeal the ridiculousness of his present situation. “And now I have to do it myself!”

“Do what, now?” He asks, a smirk quirking the corners of his mouth at her childish complaints.

“Kiss you,” she exclaims, as though it is the most obvious thing in the world. “Just the once,” she adds hastily, “just to see…”

“No, Elizabeth,” he says, but he knows it is already too late. He tries to convince himself that kissing her could purge her from his heart, put to death his obsession and crushing love, the love that will surely strangle him if he does not strangle it first.

 _This will be the kiss_ , he tells himself, _that ends it, the one says_ ‘ _now I know what you are and how you taste, and I can be rid of you’._ James Norrington, former Commodore, has become far too adept at lying to himself.

He says nothing more, but only looks at her challengingly, as if to say ‘well, go on then, don’t make such a fuss about it, you silly girl. It’s only me.’ _  
_

_Yes,_ Elizabeth thinks _, it’s only James_. That’s exactly the problem. ‘ _Only’_ has nothing to do with it.

“Just to see if I’ve been missing out on something…” she says, and she is not sure who she is trying to convince that this is a good idea: him or herself. But she has been waiting so long for a wedding night, or even a kiss from someone who wants her, and Jack dances around her, never quite daring to lean in that final inch. And God only knows where Will’s buggered off to; some husband he’s turning out to be.

So.

James.

Is here.

And so is she, and she should have done this a long time ago. Just to see.

Her head tilts sideways and she moves toward him almost imperceptibly, wetting her lips with her pink tongue. It is then that she sees the fire reflecting in his eyes and knows what sort of wild animal she has just unleashed, but it is too late to save herself and Elizabeth would not bother even if she could. This is what she wanted, after all.

 

* * *

 

  
“Y’see what I mean,” Ragetti says to Pintel, nodding wisely. He keeps his good eye on his friend as his wooden eye stares unblinkingly toward the dark corner where Elizabeth and James are now challenging each other. “Conflicted.”

“Aye,” Pintel agrees, chuckling to himself and showing a mouth full of rotten teeth. “There’s a wench won’t make up her mind till doomsday. If that.” He gives Ragetti a significant look, and then launches into a ballad about a girl named Kate who snubbed the sailors in favor of landlubbers. “She loved not the savor of tar or of pitch,”

“Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch, so to sea, boys, and let her go hang!” Gibbs finishes the song with a flourish.

“That’s Shakespeare, that is,” Ragetti puts in. “From _The Tempest_.” The other two shoot him a withering glare, rolling their eyes, and he subsides again into silence.

 

* * *

 

  
Their lips come together with bruising force, rather like magnets, and stunned as Elizabeth is, when he bites on her lower lip she opens to his demands. She tastes like oranges and gardenia and rain. He smells like the smoke from their fire and he tastes like rum and scorn, neither of which she likes, but they make the most confusing and enchanting combination on him because she never expected it from James of all people. The rough bristles on his face rub her cheeks and chin raw as they kiss, and she loves it, making a kittenish moan at the rough treatment. He is in total control and possession of the kiss and of her, claiming her in no uncertain terms, but then she remembers she’s meant to kiss him back and something changes.

He freezes, and then he is suddenly desperately exploring her, every inch of her mouth, as though he is about to die from want of her. She drowns in the sensations and emotions rolling off him; she is enveloped in his need and she responds to it without thinking, kissing it and stroking it away with her fingers tangled in his hair and on his neck. Something shifts yet again, and they find their rhythm and place together, and all she can think as her tongue tangles slowly, luxuriantly with his is: _home_. _I’m home,_ even though it is a ludicrous sentiment.

Will is home, of course. James is just… a mysterious and beautiful island on which she has been marooned, an island she cannot afford to explore, much as she might like to. Much as she would like to build a bamboo house there and live happily on bananas and coconuts for the rest of her life. She pulls away from him slowly and stares into his green eyes, dark with some feeling she can’t read. She is breathing heavily and her lips are parted and swollen from their kiss.

 _Do you still think I’m a good man, Elizabeth?_ He wants to ask it, but he knows he won’t bother.

“Well,” he says with a sardonic eyebrow raised, trying to hide the shaking of his hands, “what have you been missing?”

“Everything,” she breathes, and knowing full well that what she is doing is wrong, presses her lips to his once more for a soft sweet brush.

 

His arms almost go around her; she feels his fingertips begin to press into her back and circle around her waist. He suddenly shoves her violently away from him, wiping his mouth with one hand. He glares at her angrily.

He was not a pirate, despite all circumstances and appearances, despite the fact that he was swabbing a pirate’s decks under a pirate’s command. But Elizabeth has made him a pirate this night by coveting what is not his.

He could have her now, he sees it in her face and in the way her body sways toward him against her will. It could be his revenge against the young Mr. Turner, knowing that someone else has had his blushing bride first.

But it is not enough, would never be enough. He would never be free of the memory of her and it would kill him all the same. No. Perhaps if he killed Will Turner … and then the pirate she makes googly eyes at, he should die too. The idea has immense appeal. He’d had little enough hope of it before, but now he is absolutely doomed to want her and her only. She has ruined him for other women.  

“Damn you, Elizabeth Swann,” he says wearily, staring over her head into some unforeseeable future, perhaps one where he has regained his status and his pride (since he will never regain his heart, he gives it up for a lost cause).

“I already am, James,” she replies, “I already am.” She sounds resigned to it.

“That’s one thing we have in common, then,” he snorts, turning to his bottle of rum again.

“James,” she says, starting to reach for him, to do what she doesn’t know. Comfort him, perhaps.

“Goodnight, _Miss_ Swann,” he says coldly, retreating into a pretence of formality. He sketches a courtly bow, muddled only by his drunken coordination, so he looks more like Jack Sparrow than he knows in his extravagance.

“I take my leave of you.”

Elizabeth suddenly feels cold.

James is leaving her, and though he may just mean for the night, he might also mean forever, and she can’t bear that. She doesn’t know why. It’s not fair to him, of course; she has Will and he’s madly in love with her. Elizabeth privately suspects most of the ship’s crew is madly in love with her, for that matter.

Yet she can’t let James go, even though she can’t keep him _and_ Will, not to mention Jack.

“Don’t ask me to do the same,” she says softly to his retreating back, and hopes it is enough.

 

 


End file.
